Combating Unproductive Meetings Through Enhanced Scheduling

Typical tips on meeting productivity include sharing the agenda beforehand, starting your meeting on time, keeping the conversation going, and asking questions.

Although those are great tips that will make any meeting more productive, it’s easy to forget the one thing that can make or break meeting productivity: the scheduling.

If scheduling a meeting sounds like a horror film title, it’s because it is. For most of us, at least.

From checking in on each and every attendee, one by one, to emailing them back and forth until you can find a time that works for them…and then having to do it all over again, because — surprises, surprise — they won’t be able to attend the meeting at the scheduled time.

If you’re currently operating like that, you shouldn’t be surprised that it takes hours or even days for you to schedule a single meeting.

You shouldn’t blame yourself for developing a toxic relationship with meetings, either. If just scheduling them drains all of your energy, the meeting prep and the actual meetings will always feel like exhausting work.

You can follow every meeting productivity tip to a “T”. Unless you have a scheduling platform that helps you do your job, your meetings will remain the same.

With that in mind, here are today’s best productivity tips for meetings:

• Schedule your meetings with one email. No more, no less.
• Find the best time for every attendee without emailing them back-and-forth.
• Schedule and organize your meetings inside your inbox, instead of switching to multiple tabs.

Do you often feel unproductive during online meetings? It’s not your fault. If you’ve been trying to get this online meeting thing right for a couple of years now, you’ve probably struggled with at least one of the following situations:

• The pain of scheduling and setting up meetings on a bunch of different platforms.
• Emailing guests back-and-forth until you can, by some miracle, settle on a time slot that works for them.
• Organizing unproductive meetings that bring up “this could’ve been an email” jokes.

The blame (and the joke) is on the platform you’re using. ‍But, the truth is, everyone is wrestling with the same online meeting issues as you are. Every. Single. Day. Yes, even though they might look like they’re experts at it.

Here’s Why:

Because the seemingly simple task of scheduling emails takes us days, when it should take us seconds. And we all know that it’s virtually impossible to plan an effective meeting when we’ve spent half of our planning time on haphazard scheduling. You don’t need a better agenda. Not necessarily. What you need is a scheduling platform that respects your time!

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